The founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, suffered a major setback when the firm’s share price dropped, resulting in an astonishing $3 billion loss. This was an unexpected turn of events for the company.
Mark Zuckerberg was the fourth richest person in the world when his wealth first surpassed $2.79 billion, but it fell by more than $2.79 billion in a single day, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. This financial rollercoaster occurred during a significant worldwide outage on Meta’s social media platforms, impacting billions of users and costing the business an estimated $3 billion.
On March 5, 2024, India Today reported that Meta’s stock closed at $490.22 after declining 1.6% during the NASDAQ trading session. In spite of this loss, Mark Zuckerberg is still the fourth richest person in the world.
Reuters reported on problems with Meta’s status dashboard, which showed that WhatsApp Business was also having issues with its application programming interface (API). About 200 complaints on DownDetector recorded disruptions, combining status updates from multiple sources, demonstrated the outage’s extensive effects.
Elon Musk made fun of Meta in a tweet, emulating the problems Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and Messenger encountered during the over 30 minute global outage. People had trouble logging into their accounts on a variety of platforms, and reports of similar problems from around the world suggested that there might be a global outage.
When Elon Musk joked on Twitter during the outage, “If you are reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” people—a.k.a. Twitterati—reacted right away.
The co-founder of Facebook’s net worth increased to $27.1 billion in February 2024 as Meta’s quarterly earnings beat Wall Street forecasts, resulting in a roughly 20% gain in the company’s shares. With a net worth of $169.5 billion, Mark Zuckerberg has surpassed Bill Gates to become the world’s richest person and to the fourth rank in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
For its Class A and Class B common stock, Meta declared a quarterly cash dividend of 50 cents per share, effective in March. When compared to Zuckerberg’s estimated 350 million shares, this action is predicted to bring him close to $175 million in quarterly payouts.
Mark Zuckerberg’s financial rollercoaster and Meta’s tenacity are being scrutinized as the firm works through the difficulties caused by the outage, prompting concerns about the company’s stability in the constantly changing field of social media behemoths.